In his book, Jason Brownlee examines ruling parties and how strong forms of these institutions have helped some authoritarian regimes survive the third wave of democratization. This is a welcome addition to recent work emphasizing the importance of institutions in nondemocratic regimes. In examining regime parties, Brownlee uses both quantitative and qualitative methods. Yet the core of the book's evidence lies in four case studies—Egypt, Malaysia, Iran, and the Philippines—in which he details the formation of ruling parties, the ways in which parties hold together elite coalitions, and the way that elite cohesion hinders the opposition in attempts to use multiparty elections to its advantage. Egypt and Malaysia demonstrate this causal chain of strong parties that has resulted in authoritarian domination for several decades, while Iran and the Philippines demonstrate the obverse: how the failure to form or support strong parties leads to inchoate elite politics that can imperil authoritarianism. In three of the four cases, Brownlee ambitiously utilizes fieldwork as well as secondary sources. That evidence for the role of ruling parties can be found in cases that come from different regions and time periods demonstrates the generality of the claim. The care with which the author traces the theoretical claims through the empirical narratives is the book's greatest strength. What he finds within the cases themselves opens up potentially interesting new puzzles for future research.

To establish the primacy of ruling parties as institutions that prolong authoritarianism, Brownlee first tackles the current popular fixation with elections. Studies of “competitive” or “electoral” authoritarianism emphasize how nondemocratic incumbents use elections to maintain their rule, while scholars of democratic transitions highlight how the opposition can use elections to overcome autocratic power. The fact that history produces both an Egypt and a Philippines, as he astutely observes, means that elections cannot be the sole explanandum for authoritarian survival. This prize, in fact, should go to regime parties.

Brownlee goes on to trace the formation (or nonformation) of ruling parties in all four cases. Immediately after their initial rise to power, authoritarian regimes were plagued by internecine strife among elites who battled over the degree to which their regimes should be inclusive. In the cases where the battle was won decisively by one faction (e.g., Gamal Abdel Nasser's in Egypt, Mahathir bin Mohamad's in Malaysia), authoritarian incumbents were able to build strong parties that locked in their victory. In contrast, when elite conflict failed to dissipate, incumbents did not allow for strong parties for fear that their rivals would use these institutions to constrain them (e.g., Iran after the 1979 Revolution, the Philippines post–World War II).

The result, broadly speaking, is authoritarian regimes of two forms. In one, ruling parties are essential in maintaining coalitions of elites who pool together their disparate constituencies in support of the incumbent. Moreover, parties are the lynchpin of these regimes because they “create power and agenda-setting influence, exerting an influence on elite behavior far beyond material distribution and exchange” (p. 215). Ruling parties are more than just patronage machines; they play a role in negotiating policy compromises among members in a way that bears some resemblance to democratic parties. The result is that elite defection is rare, if not nonexistent; and with little chance of peeling away crucial political and military supporters of the regime, the opposition has little chance of winning any contest against authoritarian incumbents. In the second type of authoritarian regime, either autocrats do not create or they build and quickly dismantle ruling parties. As a consequence, elite strife is a constant of these regimes, resulting in serious instability as disgruntled elites sometimes make common cause with the opposition.

Brownlee nicely uses the cases of Egypt and Malaysia to illustrate the path of strong parties, and those of Iran and the Philippines to demonstrate what happens when ruling parties are weak or nonexistent. Regarding Egypt and Malaysia, he details how incumbents were able to consolidate their power. Yet much of the way in which this appears to have been done is by purging rival elites and outmaneuvering opposition parties. As a result, there is less detail about how parties hold together coalitions by creating the bases of compromise among elites. In contrast, the cases of Iran and the Philippines clearly exemplify what happens when strong ruling parties do not exist to regulate elite conflict and the survival of the regimes themselves, not just the incumbent leaders, is endangered.

The asymmetry in evidence for the two causal chains is likely a function of the authoritarian regimes themselves. When authoritarian regimes are durable—like those in Egypt and Malaysia—it is unlikely that detailed information about how elites regulate their own internal conflicts is publicly accessible. No one from the inside has an incentive to reveal the inner workings of the regime (if they intend to continue benefiting from it), while the structure is impermeable to outside observers. In contrast, when things fall apart, disgruntled elites may make public overtures to those outside the regime or they may even have incentives to reveal the regime's dirty laundry. In either case, in unstable regimes information comes out.

Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization provides solid support for the role of ruling parties, but it also raises questions that should be on the agenda of institutionalists studying dictatorships. First, Brownlee's work forces us to think harder about the formation of ruling parties. In general, rulers would be better off in the long run with parties. Yet in some situations, short-term exigencies trump long-run considerations. The larger point, then, is that the construction of ruling parties, like any institution, requires conscious choices and resources that depend on particular historical contexts. The author, for example, asserts and shows how autocratic leaders in Egypt and Malaysia did not build parties until after they had vanquished rival elites. Parties themselves, then, were not essential in providing this victory, but they later became important in maintaining the coalitions that supported the leader. The implication is that the processes of forming and maintaining ruling parties are very different, and while much scholarship has focused on how ruling parties operate, less work has focused on how they were formed in the first place.

Second is the issue of elite conflict and its influence on regime survival. In the case of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos's inability to contain his rivals clearly led to his fall. Yet in Iran, where the battles among traditional rightists, moderate rightists, and leftists have raged since the early days of the Revolution, they have not resulted in the fall of the Islamic regime. Either it is too soon to tell or there are other ways in which elite conflict can be managed so that it does not imperil the survival of authoritarianism.